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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor on 3 January 2010
"HAPPY NEW YEAR"
Happy New Year to you all: I hope this new year, and indeed the whole year, will be happy for you and your families and for the causes that concern you. And I hope this year will be happy not simply in some superficial sense of the absence of the things that irritate or annoy or the presence of things that give us momentary pleasure, but happy in the more biblical sense of blessed. I hope you will be blessed this year: that whatever lies ahead of you this year, it will involve some deepening of your experience, some lessening of your fear and anxiety and the replacement of a facile optimism that this is the best of all possible worlds with an enduring trust that "all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well".
In the blessings that we may receive this year, if we are open enough to receive them, we may expect that our religion, our sense of God, will be one source, maybe a fundamental source, of blessing. I guess we come here and to other churches week by week in the expectation that we will receive something that will be resourceful to us in the weeks and months ahead. It may not be a life-changing revelation that we receive - though such things do happen and more often than we might expect. Our religion will almost certainly not answer all our problems in one pat panacea - though very often we approach our religion in some such quasi magical way. And are deeply disappointed and subsequently disillusioned when our religious hopes crumble to nothing as our prayers remain unanswered. Indeed our exposure to religious questions and the practice of our faith may raise many more questions than it answers. And with or without the help of Richard Dawkins and company, we may find ourselves uneasy about the way in which religion - particularly our brand of it - engages with the world and its people and its problems.
So what are the blessings of religion that I am wishing you as I greet you with the traditional Happy New Year this morning?
First of all, let us be honest about the curse of religion. In yesterday's Guardian, in a report on the newly imposed blasphemy laws brought in in the Republic of Ireland, Richard Dawkins was quoted by a group called Atheist Ireland as an intellectual whose onslaughts against religion would be banned under the new Irish law. In a challenge to the Irish government, Atheist Ireland quoted Professor Dawkins amongst others.
"The God of the Old Testament", said Dawkins, ¡s arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak: a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticide, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Under such an onslaught we may wish to take comfort in the fact that the God of the New Testament is portrayed more as a lover than as a terminator. Or we may wish to take issue with Dawkins and develop an interpretative hermeneutic which allows us both to recognise the often extreme pathology of Old Testament writings and to value the profound theology and spirituality that undoubtedly informs the Hebrew scriptures despite their excesses. This is a kind of contextualisation that Dawkins always fails to explore in any discipline outside his own,.
Or we may wish to accept that the track record of religion in engaging with the world, its people and its problems, is not an unblemished one. That religion is as much a problem - if not the problem - in the disorder of the world as a solution. I'm afraid that John Bowker's 1987 book Licensed Insanities may have gone out of print but it hasn't gone out of fashion. For there, one of the great theologians in Britain today chronicles the "involvement of religious beliefs and ideology in so many of the dangerous and destructive problems in the world". "Religions are extremely dangerous animals", he writes, "and one might well put up on their boundary a notice I once saw in a game reserve in Africa "Advance and be bitten". We don't have to look back to the Crusades or the Civil War or the Reformation to advance the case that religions are extremely dangerous animals. Look at our world today. Cast your memory back over the events of the last decade, the first of a new millennium that promised so much. In the last few weeks alone we have heard of an attempted destruction of an airliner in Detroit; there has been the possibility of dissolving the power-sharing agreement in northern Ireland; the carnage and ongoing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan; the seeming inability to start the peace process in Israel-Palestine, let alone bring such a process to any hopeful conclusion. All these occurrences, and the intractable problems that occasion them, have a religious component. And it is small wonder then that many, despairing of the capacity of religions to live out the best wisdom of their creeds, turn to the critique of Richard Dawkins and his bleak assessment of a world devoid of moral purpose beyond the evolutionary programme.
So what are the blessings of religion that I am wishing you as I greet you with the traditional Happy New Year this morning? Well, against the catalogue of religion's shortcomings, we have to recognise that religions are, and remain, the resource and the inspiration of almost all the greatest achievements of human creativity, whether in art or architecture or agriculture, music, poetry, drama, spiritual exploration, even, in origin, the development of the natural sciences. This creative resourcefulness of religions remains as vital now as it has been in the past. And in the arena of social action, it has often been religious imperatives that have sustained specific initiatives ¡V whether we think of the Hospice Movement, L¡¦Arche Communities, Christian Aid or Amnesty International.
And furthermore, to return to John Bowker again, religions are not unequivocally and exclusively bad news. The paradox to be grasped is that religions are highly dangerous because they are so important and because they create so much in, and of, human life ¡s The reason that religions are so important is that they are a consequence of extremely ancient and long-running explorations by the human animal of its own nature and its possibilities and of how best it can sustain the possibilities of its own continuing life".
We may discover through our week-by-week assembly here clues about how to be better people by reinforcing our shared values and our sense of what is most important in human life. For all the manifest flaws of our religion (which are related to our manifest flaws as individuals and as communities), the sense of God which we glean through our worship, our openness to God¡¦s word in scripture, our sharing of bread and wine, and our care for one another, give us resources for living, and living creatively and humanly, in a world that often seems to have lost its capacity for creativity and humanity. That, I think, is a not insubstantial blessing for us who gather in church at the beginning of a new year.
And perhaps I can at last bring us back to this morning's gospel as a thought for this week. St John makes a distinction that I think is fundamental to a Christian grasp of reality: "the law indeed was given through Moses: grace and truth came through Jesus Christ¡¨. There's a lot of unpacking that needs to be done to understand fully the distinction St John is making. But one blessing he invokes is the sense that we don't earn or deserve or merit our salvation. The law given by Moses may indeed be an important guide to moral imperatives, but in Jesus Christ we are given something ¡V grace and truth John calls it ¡V that far exceeds anything we can do, measure, earn or control: and it is that something ¡V that grace and truth ¡V that can transform human lives.
And John concludes this famous prologue to his gospel before plunging into the ministry of John the Baptist, and the whole scenario changes to the ministry of Jesus as he puts into practice the concept with which John began his gospel of the Word made flesh. John concludes the prologue with the words "no one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known".
In that sentence John the Evangelist sums up the major themes of his gospel:
- seeing beyond the vision of normal sight so that we come not only physically sighted but spiritually sighted as believers;
- discovering that through Jesus Christ ¡s and seeing him as he truly is ¡s we have access to what is real and true and ultimate: that is the Father whom Jesus makes known to us;
- recognising that Jesus is ¡s close to the Father's heart.
Intimacy between father and son runs like a golden thread through this gospel. The Father and the Son are one ¡s so much so that we can do no other, absurd though it seems, than recognise in Jesus the face of God himself. But, and this surely must be the greatest blessing for us, who are curious to make sense of religion in our lives - the intimacy between Father and Son is a shared intimacy with us. We, because of the ministry and in particular the dying and rising of Jesus, have become, what we were made to be, the children of God, his sons and daughters - intimates with God and sharers of the divine life.
Into that divine intimacy we are invited every day of our lives. The blessing of our life this year and every year is when we respond to the invitation and accept what we are so freely given - the Father's unconditional love for us.
May this whole year be a blessing to you. Amen.
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In the blessings that we may receive this year, if we are open enough to receive them, we may expect that our religion, our sense of God, will be one source, maybe a fundamental source, of blessing. I guess we come here and to other churches week by week in the expectation that we will receive something that will be resourceful to us in the weeks and months ahead. It may not be a life-changing revelation that we receive - though such things do happen and more often than we might expect. Our religion will almost certainly not answer all our problems in one pat panacea - though very often we approach our religion in some such quasi magical way. And are deeply disappointed and subsequently disillusioned when our religious hopes crumble to nothing as our prayers remain unanswered. Indeed our exposure to religious questions and the practice of our faith may raise many more questions than it answers. And with or without the help of Richard Dawkins and company, we may find ourselves uneasy about the way in which religion - particularly our brand of it - engages with the world and its people and its problems.
So what are the blessings of religion that I am wishing you as I greet you with the traditional Happy New Year this morning?
First of all, let us be honest about the curse of religion. In yesterday's Guardian, in a report on the newly imposed blasphemy laws brought in in the Republic of Ireland, Richard Dawkins was quoted by a group called Atheist Ireland as an intellectual whose onslaughts against religion would be banned under the new Irish law. In a challenge to the Irish government, Atheist Ireland quoted Professor Dawkins amongst others.
"The God of the Old Testament", said Dawkins, ¡s arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak: a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticide, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Under such an onslaught we may wish to take comfort in the fact that the God of the New Testament is portrayed more as a lover than as a terminator. Or we may wish to take issue with Dawkins and develop an interpretative hermeneutic which allows us both to recognise the often extreme pathology of Old Testament writings and to value the profound theology and spirituality that undoubtedly informs the Hebrew scriptures despite their excesses. This is a kind of contextualisation that Dawkins always fails to explore in any discipline outside his own,.
Or we may wish to accept that the track record of religion in engaging with the world, its people and its problems, is not an unblemished one. That religion is as much a problem - if not the problem - in the disorder of the world as a solution. I'm afraid that John Bowker's 1987 book Licensed Insanities may have gone out of print but it hasn't gone out of fashion. For there, one of the great theologians in Britain today chronicles the "involvement of religious beliefs and ideology in so many of the dangerous and destructive problems in the world". "Religions are extremely dangerous animals", he writes, "and one might well put up on their boundary a notice I once saw in a game reserve in Africa "Advance and be bitten". We don't have to look back to the Crusades or the Civil War or the Reformation to advance the case that religions are extremely dangerous animals. Look at our world today. Cast your memory back over the events of the last decade, the first of a new millennium that promised so much. In the last few weeks alone we have heard of an attempted destruction of an airliner in Detroit; there has been the possibility of dissolving the power-sharing agreement in northern Ireland; the carnage and ongoing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan; the seeming inability to start the peace process in Israel-Palestine, let alone bring such a process to any hopeful conclusion. All these occurrences, and the intractable problems that occasion them, have a religious component. And it is small wonder then that many, despairing of the capacity of religions to live out the best wisdom of their creeds, turn to the critique of Richard Dawkins and his bleak assessment of a world devoid of moral purpose beyond the evolutionary programme.
So what are the blessings of religion that I am wishing you as I greet you with the traditional Happy New Year this morning? Well, against the catalogue of religion's shortcomings, we have to recognise that religions are, and remain, the resource and the inspiration of almost all the greatest achievements of human creativity, whether in art or architecture or agriculture, music, poetry, drama, spiritual exploration, even, in origin, the development of the natural sciences. This creative resourcefulness of religions remains as vital now as it has been in the past. And in the arena of social action, it has often been religious imperatives that have sustained specific initiatives ¡V whether we think of the Hospice Movement, L¡¦Arche Communities, Christian Aid or Amnesty International.
And furthermore, to return to John Bowker again, religions are not unequivocally and exclusively bad news. The paradox to be grasped is that religions are highly dangerous because they are so important and because they create so much in, and of, human life ¡s The reason that religions are so important is that they are a consequence of extremely ancient and long-running explorations by the human animal of its own nature and its possibilities and of how best it can sustain the possibilities of its own continuing life".
We may discover through our week-by-week assembly here clues about how to be better people by reinforcing our shared values and our sense of what is most important in human life. For all the manifest flaws of our religion (which are related to our manifest flaws as individuals and as communities), the sense of God which we glean through our worship, our openness to God¡¦s word in scripture, our sharing of bread and wine, and our care for one another, give us resources for living, and living creatively and humanly, in a world that often seems to have lost its capacity for creativity and humanity. That, I think, is a not insubstantial blessing for us who gather in church at the beginning of a new year.
And perhaps I can at last bring us back to this morning's gospel as a thought for this week. St John makes a distinction that I think is fundamental to a Christian grasp of reality: "the law indeed was given through Moses: grace and truth came through Jesus Christ¡¨. There's a lot of unpacking that needs to be done to understand fully the distinction St John is making. But one blessing he invokes is the sense that we don't earn or deserve or merit our salvation. The law given by Moses may indeed be an important guide to moral imperatives, but in Jesus Christ we are given something ¡V grace and truth John calls it ¡V that far exceeds anything we can do, measure, earn or control: and it is that something ¡V that grace and truth ¡V that can transform human lives.
And John concludes this famous prologue to his gospel before plunging into the ministry of John the Baptist, and the whole scenario changes to the ministry of Jesus as he puts into practice the concept with which John began his gospel of the Word made flesh. John concludes the prologue with the words "no one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known".
In that sentence John the Evangelist sums up the major themes of his gospel:
- seeing beyond the vision of normal sight so that we come not only physically sighted but spiritually sighted as believers;
- discovering that through Jesus Christ ¡s and seeing him as he truly is ¡s we have access to what is real and true and ultimate: that is the Father whom Jesus makes known to us;
- recognising that Jesus is ¡s close to the Father's heart.
Intimacy between father and son runs like a golden thread through this gospel. The Father and the Son are one ¡s so much so that we can do no other, absurd though it seems, than recognise in Jesus the face of God himself. But, and this surely must be the greatest blessing for us, who are curious to make sense of religion in our lives - the intimacy between Father and Son is a shared intimacy with us. We, because of the ministry and in particular the dying and rising of Jesus, have become, what we were made to be, the children of God, his sons and daughters - intimates with God and sharers of the divine life.
Into that divine intimacy we are invited every day of our lives. The blessing of our life this year and every year is when we respond to the invitation and accept what we are so freely given - the Father's unconditional love for us.
May this whole year be a blessing to you. Amen.